From Pulp to Fiction: our love affair with paper

It may seem strange to describe paper as technology, but its arrival in England in about 1300 was a pivotal moment in cultural history. That story is being pieced together for the first time in a new project that also promises to reveal much about why some innovations succeed where others fail Paper became a pivotal technology for a subsequent explosion in the transmission of knowledge. Orietta Da Rold How's this for a measure of the pace of the tech revolution? Twenty years ago, you would have read this article only on paper; now it is also available on your tablet, smartphone or computer. The impact of digital media has become so pervasive that even remarking upon it feels trite. Where predictions that printed books and newspapers are dying once seemed far-fetched, the future now seems less certain. If we do become a paperless society, we will be terminating a relationship with one of the most successful technologies of all time; one that has endured for 700 years in England, and much longer elsewhere. Our reliance on paper runs so deep that it seems strange to think of it as technology at all.